About Me

I'm a semi-retired professional man, living in the Midwestern United States. This blog is a personal blog and is not directly connected with my professional practice (although I may draw upon my professional experiences, as well as my personal experiences, in writing my blog posts). This is a place for personal, not professional, opinions.

The Blogroll

May 2010

05/25/2010

A few days ago, I had a long talk with a former executive assistant I hadn't spoken with in several years. She was my right hand for many years and basically ran my professional life for me when I left Big Law behind 18 years ago and set out to practice law in a more sane fashion.

This woman is smart, funny, drop dead gorgeous (she was once a professional model), and a serious "natural" body builder. She can stop you in your tracks with her looks and drop you in your tracks with a well aimed right hook or a hilarious punch line. She deserves a mate who loves her completely and unconditionally. Naturally, she married a guy who turned out to be a serial cheater in the Tiger Woods/Jesse James mold.

She finally gave up trying to save the marriage for the sake of their ten year old daughter and divorced him this year. As we were discussing his appalling actions, I expressed incredulity at some of his attitudes, and she replied "But, Kevin, he's a classic narcissist." She was absolutely right.

It brought to mind to mind a post I wrote for an earlier version of this blog and that I have decided to update and recycle. This one's for you, Annie.

This is what Abraham Maslow meant when he wrote, while recuperating from his heart attack: "Death and its ever present possibility makes love, passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could love passionately, if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we'd never die." This is not simply an expression of "I almost lost this...I almost died," but is a sensing of the rich depth that comes from the awareness of destiny and the new possibilities, the new freedom of aesthetic sensibility, that then opens up.---Rollo May, Freedom and Destiny

Last week, I came across the web site of a woman I once knew well, who, when I knew her, believed that life was a game and the people in it merely pawns, knights, bishops and rooks placed here for her to move about the board for her exclusive amusement. I thought that perhaps (and only perhaps) if such a person suffered the loss of someone she loved, she might have a fighting chance of finally comprehending what love--true, passionate love of others, rather than of herself--was all about. She was an "artful dodger," a skilled impersonator of human emotions, playing roles that she assumed (wife, mother, lover, sinner, saint) with intelligence and skill. When you compared her words to her actions, however, it was apparent that they were only roles. Life was a play, she the star, and all the rest of us lived only to play supporting roles. Even her love of her son and daughter was framed by her in terms of her self-sacrifice to bear and raise the children, and her love of her husband in terms of her sufferance of his egregious defects.

Her husband was in ill health. At the time, I wondered: would his death, or that of a child, or of anyone else "close" to her, change her profoundly? Certainly, it would many of us. Certainly, it has many of us.

More from May's book:

"Narcissism is self-hate disguised as self-love," says Clint Weyand. "It is probably the cruelest and most insidious form of self-deception, because it destroys the healing power of loving relationships"...There can be no sense of the self without a sense of the destiny of that self. How we respond to the facts of illness, disaster, good fortune, success, renewed life, death ad infinitum is crucial; and the pattern of such response is the self relating to destiny.

After viewing her site, I don't think that even the death of her husband or one of her children would have opened her eyes to anything other than the opportunity to play the role of bereaved widow or mother of a dead child. The head shot of herself that she had recently posted to her web site was such an obviously staged and artificial attempt to create the image of herself as a serious artiste that when I first saw it, I nearly burst out laughing. Then, I simply felt sad. The photograph (and, in fact, the content of the entire site) is a stark demonstration of unabashed vanity.

A narcissist is too powerfully seduced by the mirror ever to learn the lessons of life that death can teach the rest of us.

Of course, one of the inexhaustible and profound capabilities of human beings of all intellectual levels is self-deception. Likely, none of us is completely free of it. Certainly, I'm not. Nevertheless, there are some who appear to be more "profoundly capable" than others.

For most of us the answer to the question of life that is posed by death is "you and me." For others, there is no answer possible other than merely "me."

So, Ann, you're "broken" now through no fault of your own other than the sadfact that many of us are deceived at one time or another in our lives by skilled narcissistic actors. It may not make the present pain any easier to bear, but know that there are those of us who love you without deception or condition, for no reason other than we've survived long enough to understand that of the virtues of faith, hope, and love, "the greatest of these is love." Also, know that what is broken will mend.

But I’m broken and I don’t understand What is broken falls into place once again. Hand of kindness, come and gather me in like a rainstorm, Again and again and again, I think I will break but I mend.

05/20/2010

Reading my most recent posts, someone asked me if I was feeling especially cranky these days. No more so than usual, although perhaps for me, "usual" means something different than it does for the average saint lost in contemplation of the divine. The last post was not meant to be serious, which I thought would be apparent, but "apparently" it was not. So, as Richard Nixon was fond of saying, "Let me make this perfectly clear: I am not a crank."

And if you believe that, I've got a great "social media marketing plan" to sell you, for whatever business you're involved with.

05/14/2010

Not a day goes by without a friend, client, colleague, family member,
casual "acquaintance," or perfect stranger asking me: "How can a jackass
like you claim to be a Christian"?

I always utter a wry chuckle,
hook my thumbs through my suspenders, lean back, glance up briefly at
the sky, fix my questioner with a knowing gaze, and reply:
"That's a damn good question, Hoss. Glad you asked it."

Here are
my answers:

I said “I’m Bitchin’” not “I’m Christian.”

I
lied.

I said I was a Christian, not a good Christian.

It
hasn't "taken" yet? Wait here, I'll try it again.

The Lord
only gets to work on the engine that's under the hood the day the car
rolls into the shop. If it's out of fluids, needs a valve job, the
undercarriage is rusted and its bearings are shot, its going to take
some time to rebuild it.

I only get to be a perfect Christian
after I die. Ain't quite there yet, but I'm getting closer, day-by-day.

You
think I'm a jackass now? You should have seen me before I found Jesus.

Please
allow me to introduce myselfI'm a man of wealth and tasteI've
been around for a long, long yearStole many a man's soul and faith.

Nice
glass house you're livin' in there, Mother Teresa.

You one of
those "jackassophobes" I read about? You need to check into a political correctness re-education camp, pronto.

05/09/2010

One the frustrating experiences of my daily existence is reading some of the pronouncements (some by extended family members and friends) on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media that blithely denigrate conservative principles and traditional values with declarative sentences that are neither empirically nor logically sound. The other day, an adult relative declared on Facebook that opposition to gay marriage was unsupportable because heterosexuals such as Tiger Woods and Jesse James have notoriously cheated on their spouses and half of heterosexual marriages end in divorce. I didn't (and I'm not going to) address the obvious lack of intellectual coherence in
this "argument," because I'm concerned about a larger issue (at least, it's "larger" to me, personally).

While this relative's Blue State family members and friends cheered her on, I was again struck by how few and weak are the ties that bind me to these "close" relatives, other than blood relationship. It's not that blood relations count for nothing, but they don't mean to me today what they meant to me when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, and they mean even less than they did to members of my parents' generation when they were growing up in the 1930s and 1940s. My father grew up in an "Irish ghetto" in New York during the Great Depression and fought in World War II. He grew up in an Irish Catholic family in the days when "Irish," "Catholic," and "family" were terms that encompassed a great number of shared values, values that were unconsciously absorbed and that were commonly held--tightly--by members of a "tribe." He tried to pass along the same values to his sons, but they grew up as part of the most narcissistic generation in the history of humanity up to that point: The Baby Boomers. Many of us thought that when we reached late puberty, we were "liberated" from such ties. We rejected those "traditional values" and "created" our own, or borrowed, often weakly, a smorgasbord of "values" we found personally attractive. For the most part those "values" made us feel good about ourselves without being too "heavy," oppressive," "repressive," or, in fact, meaningful. We then proceeded to sire and raise a generation of children even more self-absorbed and unbridled by the prescriptions or prejudices of the "Democracy of the Dead."

I've tried to have discussions with relatives who don't share the traditional religious beliefs of Christians and Jews, the respect for traditional definitions of such institutions "marriage" and "family," or, for that matter, traditional standards of "right and wrong," and to explore what common beliefs we can share and why we should share them. I find that when we try to drill down to the foundation of their "nontraditional, "self-created" beliefs, we find they are built upon sand, yet held to by fierce emotion, rather than intellectual coherence. You can't drill down very far with them through the Socratic method without eliciting a strong, negative, emotional reaction from them, and often one-sided yelling occurs (amazingly for those who know me, the yelling is directed at me, not by me). So, I've given up that quest.

Irving Babbitt, a conservative thinker of the early twentieth century who's little remembered today, wrote about the problem of the rejection of traditional values at a time when that rejection was not nearly as widespread as it's become today. His words are prophetic.

With the progressive weakening of traditional standards, the inability of the humanitarian to supply an adequate substitute is becoming apparent. The whole of the Occident seems to be at an impasse. The mere rationalist and the mere emotionalist are about equally bankrupt. It may be that our only hope is a return to the truths of an inner life. If we ourselves are unable to see the need for such a return, it is perhaps because we have reached the stage of the decadent Romans who, according to Livy, were unable to endure the evils from which they were suffering and also the remedies for those evils.

I suppose my sense of frustration and alienation is also fueled by the fact that whether or not you believe in the "truths" to which people like Babbitt (and I) think we must return, there is no recognition that living your life by the slogan "whatever floats your boat" is a recipe for the disintegration of our society. We must have strong foundational values that bind us to one another or we're doomed.

Contemporary Americans, and contemporary Europeans as well, seek contradictory goals. They are increasingly distrustful of any authority, political or moral, that would constrain their freedom of choice, but they also want a sense of community and the good feelings that flow from community, like mutual recognition, participation, belonging, and identity. Community has to be found elsewhere, in smaller and more flexible groups and organizations where loyalties and memberships can be overlapping, and where entry and exit entail relatively low costs. People might thus be able to reconcile their contradictory desires for community and autonomy. But in this bargain, the community they get is smaller and weaker than most that have existed in the past. Each community shares less with neighboring ones, and the ones to which they belong have relatively little hold. The circle of people they can trust is necessarily narrower. The essence of the shift in values that is at the center of the Great Disruption is, then, the rise of moral individualism and the consequent miniaturization of community."

Pardon me for thinking we're screwed. Pardon me, also, if I'm sad because I realize how utterly estranged I am from people I was once close to, or at least thought I was.

Spend a week in Las Vegas. It will be enough time to drive home to just about anyone not already lost, the rancidness of the end game of a life lived primarily in pursuit of sensual pleasures. Nobody loves a sanctimonious SOB. Yet, it doesn't take a saint to realize that while physical sensations can be powerful, they can be a drug that obscures rather than enlightens.

I may not be the brightest bulb in the lamp store, but I'd rather not end up looking like the Picture of Dorian Gray. There's got to be a better way to live your life than that chosen by the voluptuously beautiful and staggeringly drunken call girl I ran into on one memorable recent trip as both of us were leaving the Bellagio early one morning, me starting my day and she finishing her night. Life's a mystery, but simple lessons are still simple. God love you, honey. I hope you found your way home.

Now, I'll just kind of try to be quiet, because it's that kind of tune, you know.

05/03/2010

Likely, I was officially an old fogy the day I was born. At least, one of my brothers-in-law insists that I have always had the tolerance level for fools of a black rhino bull with a thorn its hoof, situated on the wrong side of a fence from the females in the herd during rutting season. Nevertheless, I personally think there's an increasingly serious disconnect between the way I think and the way Generation Y thinks and this disconnect is making me a tad cranky.

Here's a perfect example: While traveling on business on few weeks ago, I'm left a voice mail message on my office phone from a first-year associate with an East Coast law firm. The young man read a post of mine on my professional blog from 2004 that discussed some esoteric point of a federal regulation and that made reference to some "guidance" that had been published by a federal agency. He couldn't find anything in the guidance that discussed the point I was making in the post. He asked if I could discuss it with him.

No mention was made of financial remuneration for me in return for my giving a first year lawyer the benefit of my 35 years of professional experience. He just asked for free advice.

Luckily for him, I was feeling like a good Christian (a rare event when you toil daily in a cesspool devoted to serving financial intermediaries who make Goldman Sachs executives look like Joe Six Packs), so I sent the kid a copy of an e-mail that contained a discussion between me and a compliance officer with the federal agency from ten years ago. The e-mail contained information he would have had to dig and dig to obtain, and saved him a scad of wasted time and effort. I also offered to send him copies of some articles I'd saved over the years that discussed this particular subject in greater detail.

I never heard a word from him. Not even a thank you.

If this was an isolated incident, I'd shrug it off as the actions of a joker whose mommy never potty trained him properly. Unfortunately, it's emblematic of a series of experiences I've had with young adults in their twenties and early thirties, lawyers and non-lawyers alike. All these incidents have common themes running through them: there's an overwhelming sense of entitlement, a lack of basic manners, and a complete lack of respect for experience and age. It's as if these young people think they have a right to whatever I know for free, and the idea that they should have to earn respect for themselves, or that they should accord respect to older successful members of their profession, is completely foreign to them.

In addition, because I write a professional blog and am not shy about expressing my opinions, I get strong disagreements from a few readers, some of whom will write me e-mails taking an opposing view. From my older correspondents, the following actual recent example is indicative of how many of them preface and end their disagreements: "While I follow your blog and enjoy it, I don't necessarily
agree with all your
views...Thanks again for your fine blog. I truly enjoy it!

In between, he basically told me that his experience on the issues did not mirror mine, and that he thought my view was wrong. Fair enough. We agreed to disagree.

A recent e-mail message from a young person in his late twenties opened with the greeting "You're weak!" He was upset that I had not gone into great detail on a blog post to explain to him the mathematical calculations that are involved in FDIC Loss-Sharing Agreements. Clients pay me hard cash (in US dollars, by the way) to give them that advice, yet this puerile jerk, who works for a real estate developer, was throwing a thumb-sucking tantrum because my free blog didn't dish out the expertise he needed. Another correspondent, a third-year associate for a medium-sized law firm in a backwater Deep-South burg, opened his e-mail by telling me how "disappointed" he was with my "rote recitation of consumer advocacy group talking points" on an issue related to a federal consumer protection law, and then proceeded to demonstrate convincingly that he completely misunderstood the basics of the law.

I'm far from a mellow fellow, but when I was a young lawyer, it would never have occurred to me to address an elder in that fashion. Never. It makes me wonder whether we're from the same planet, much less from the same society.

Friends with children in this age group tell me that these attitudes are common among Gen Y. They require "special handling," the parents advise me. The only special handling they'll get from me is a size 11, Justin Copper Caprice work boot up their asses.

I guess that just makes me one gosh-darned insensitive guy, doesn't it?

05/02/2010

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